But as she talked to the man who was the last remaining witness to the interplay of sowing and harvesting in her life together with her dead husband, then it seemed to her that she had come to view her life in a new way: like a person who clambers up to a ridge overlooking his home parish, to a place where he has never been before, and gazes down on his own valley. Each farm and fence, each thicket and creek bed are familiar to him, but he seems to see for the first time how everything is laid out on the surface of the earth that bears the lands. And with this new view she suddenly found words to release both her bitterness toward Erlend and her anguish for his soul, which had departed life so abruptly. He had never known rancor; she saw that now, and God had seen it always.
She had finally come so far that she seemed to be seeing her own life from the uppermost summit of a mountain pass. Now her path led down into the darkening valley, but first she had been allowed to see that in the solitude of the cloister and in the doorway of death someone was waiting for her who had always seen the lives of people the way villages look from a mountain crest. He had seen sin and sorrow, love and hatred in their hearts, the way the wealthy estates and poor hovels, the bountiful acres and the abandoned wastelands are all borne by the same earth. And he had come down among them, his feet had wandered among the lands, stood in castles and in huts, gathering the sorrows and sins of the rich and the poor, and lifting them high up with him on the cross. Not my happiness or my pride, but my sin and my sorrow, oh sweet Lord of mine. She looked up at the crucifix, where it hung high overhead, above the triumphal arch.
The morning sun lit the tall, colored panes of glass deep within the forest of pillars in the choir and a glow, as if from red and brown, green and blue gemstones, dimmed the candlelight from the altar and the gold shrine behind it. Kristin listened to the last vigil mass, matins. She knew that the lessons of this service were about God’s miraculous healing powers as invested in His faithful knight, King Olav Haraldss?n. She lifted the ill child toward the choir and prayed for her.
But she was so cold that her teeth were chattering after the long hours spent in the chill of the church, and she felt weak from fasting. The stench of the crowds and the sickening breath of the ill and the poor blended with the reek of candle wax and settled, thick and damp and heavy, upon those kneeling on the floor, cold in the cold morning. A stout, kind, and cheerful peasant woman had been sitting and dozing at the foot of a pillar right behind them, with a bearskin under her and another one over her lame legs. Now she woke up and drew Kristin’s weary head onto her spacious lap. “Rest for a little while, sister. I think you must need to rest.”
Kristin fell asleep in the woman’s lap and dreamed:
She was stepping over the threshold into the old hearth room back home. She was young and unmarried, because she could see her own thick brown braids, which hung down in front of her shoulders. She was with Erlend, for he had just straightened up after ducking through the doorway ahead of her.
Near the hearth sat her father, whittling arrows; his lap was covered with bundles of sinews, and on the bench on either side of him lay heaps of arrowpoints and pointed shafts. At the very moment they stepped inside, he was bending forward over the embers, about to pick up the little three-legged metal cup in which he always used to melt resin. Suddenly he pulled his hand back, shook it in the air, and then stuck his burned fingertips in his mouth, sucking on them as he turned his head toward her and Erlend and looked at them with a furrowed brow and a smile on his lips.
Then she woke up, her face wet with tears.
She knelt during the high mass, when the archbishop himself performed the service before the main altar. Clouds of frankincense billowed through the intoning church, where the radiance of colored sunlight mingled with the glow of candles; the fresh, pungent scent of incense seeped over everyone, blunting the smell of poverty and illness. Her heart burst with a feeling of oneness with these destitute and suffering people, among whom God had placed her; she prayed in a surge of sisterly tenderness for all those who were poor as she was and who suffered as she herself had suffered.
“I will rise up and go home to my Father.”
CHAPTER 6
THE CONVENT STOOD on a low ridge near the fjord, so that when the wind blew, the crash of the waves on the shore would usually drown out the rustling of the pine forest that covered the slopes to the north and west and hid any view of the sea.
Kristin had seen the church tower above the trees when she sailed past with Erlend, and he had said several times they ought to pay a visit to this convent, which his ancestor had founded, but nothing had ever come of it. She had never set foot in Rein Convent until she came there to stay.
She had imagined that life here would be similar to what she knew of life in the convents in Oslo or at Bakke, but things were quite different and much more quiet. Here the sisters were truly dead to the world. Fru Ragnhild, the abbess, was proud of the fact that it had been five years since she had been to Nidaros and just as long since any of her nuns had set foot outside the cloister walls.
No children were being raised there, and at the time Kristin came to Rein, there were no novices at the convent either. It had been so many years since any young maiden had sought admittance to the order that it was already six winters ago that the newest member, Sister Borghild Marcellina, had taken her vows. The youngest in years was Sister Turid, but she had been sent to Rein at the age of six by her grandfather, who was a priest at Saint Clement’s Church and a very stern and somber man. The child’s hands had been crippled from birth, and she was misshapen in other ways too, so she had taken the veil as soon as she reached the proper age. Now she was thirty years old and quite sickly, but she had a lovely face. From the first day Kristin arrived at the convent, she made a special attempt to serve Sister Turid, for the nun reminded her of her own little sister Ulvhild, who had died so young.